What is lifelong learning?

The mountainscape image I chose for this post was taken at the top of Kerby Peak in Southern Oregon (possibly to be a part of my exploring series). The image always reminds me of the nursery rhyme, “The bear went over the mountain.” Though I am fairly confident I remember the rhyme incorrectly, in my mind, it goes something like this, “A bear went over a mountain to see what he could see. When he got to the top of the mountain, all that he could see was another mountain. So he climbed the next mountain, and all he could see was yet another mountain.” And on and on this goes. I have looked up the lyrics and I now realize the nursery rhyme was either taught to me incorrectly, or I misremembered the lyrics somewhere along the lines. Nevertheless, this is the song that always plays in my head. The imagery within the rhyme defines a lifelong learner. Lifelong learning is about climbing the mountain of knowledge in front of you, enjoying the view, and looking for the next mountain. Lifelong learners are committed to this journey of learning and are the mountaineers of the intellectual wilderness.

It took me many years to realize that learning is my greatest skill and my favorite activity. This is probably what originally led me to a career in education. I mistook a love of learning for a love of teaching. Now, I do really enjoy teaching, but I enjoy teaching much more when I am learning along with the students. I’ve found this also encourages the students to learn more and retain more information. They not only learned the content, but they also learned HOW to learn the content. The problem with my education career, however, is once I taught a subject 2-3 times, the learning was done for me. I had learned all that could be learned from that course. Which greatly diminished my enjoyment of teaching the subject. This is when I started to realize I wasn’t in love with teaching, but with learning. This realization has ultimately led me to write this blog. I am constantly learning new things, like how to blog, and I want to share them with you, but more than that, I want to share the process with you. I would always tell my students the greatest skill I could ever teach them was not algebra, or geometry, or physics, or chemistry, but HOW to learn. I hope to teach that to you too.

It takes time to develop the skills of a learner. A lifelong learner must be bold, persistent, unafraid of failure, curious, and open minded. The curiosity seems fairly self explanatory. If you are going to learn things, you have to be curious first. You have to want to learn things. You have to constantly be asking questions like how? and why?. You also have to be able to go the extra mile to push yourself to learn. For example, I am writing my own HTML for this blog. HTML Is a program browsers use to run websites. I definitely could do it the right way and use a blog creating website. If I did that, however, I wouldn’t be learning HTML and I want to learn HTML. I might be interested in working as a web designer in the future, therefore, I am doing this the hard way and writing my own code and learning a lot along the way.

Another thing lifelong learners must be, is bold. Boldness is required for that first step. If you are starting a project you want to learn from, then naturally the first step is going into the unknown. This part is scary, and you need to be bold in order to make the unknown known. I’ll give another example. Years ago, my Jeep's transmission broke and I couldn’t use first gear. In a three speed jeep, first gear is crucial. I contemplated my options for a while. I could take my jeep into the shop and have them fix it, because the mechanic could fix it in no time. However, all that would teach me is where to find the mechanic to work on my Jeep. One of the reasons I bought this 50 year old jeep was to learn how to work on vehicles, therefore, I needed to try to fix the transmission myself. I had no idea what I was doing and I did not know how the parts fit together or how the gears were able to shift. All I knew was I could learn how to fix it. So I took the first step. I dropped the transmission from the Jeep and opened it up. This is the boldness that I am talking about. You have to be willing to say, “I can’t do that…yet.” You may not know how to do something when you start, but that’s not the point of learning. The point of learning is to know how to do things when you finish. So be bold and take on the challenges that you don’t know how to do… yet.

The unfortunate reality of lifelong learning is, you are going to fail. Which brings us to another thing you’ll need to be a lifelong learner. You must be unafraid to fail. Of course you can be frustrated by failure, but afraid of failure, no. Learning doesn’t come through success, but through failure. There’s a great book by Stanislas Dehaene titled How We Learn and this book explains this topic in better detail. The brain doesn’t learn when reality meets our expectations. The brain learns when reality is different from what it expects (aka. failure). Every project I have worked on has resulted in failure at least once, but usually several times, during the process. The key is, you have to investigate your failures and determine why they failed. It is through this process you’ll learn that you can’t be afraid to fail.

Lastly, or at least as far as this post goes, lifelong learners must be open minded. When you first start a project or after a failure, you have to figure out what your next steps are. Why did it fail?, What will you do next?, and How do you fix it? As you look for this information, you’ll find that it can come from many different places. You have to be willing to accept it. Perhaps you find the information in a blog post, an old dusty book, or an old timer living out in the woods. No matter where the information comes from, you must be willing to find it and use it. This modern society is inundated with information, you just have to go looking.

Learning is one of the most powerful tools you can have in your toolbox. With the ability to learn, there will be very few things you can’t do. Being a lifelong learner means you are constantly broadening your horizon, you are always getting a better view of the world, and it means, when you get to the top of the mountain you’re climbing, you start looking for the next mountain.